What do you get when you take chemists from all around the country, stick them in a convention…
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Johnson's rap, titled "Quest for Joulelry," is the winner of this year's Science Genius Rap B.A.T.T.L.E.S., held last month at Columbia University. The competition is the product of a collaboration between Rap Genius, Columbia math professor and urban science education pioneer Christopher Emdin and Wu Tang Clan's GZA:

B.A.T.T.L.E.S. (Bringing Attention to Transforming, Teaching and Learning Science) was conceived as a way to keep students engaged in school and in science... GZA and Jeremy Dean of Rap Genius were among the six judges who watched as teens ages 14 to 20 strode the stage at TC's Joyce B. Cowin Conference Center and "spat" lyrics that ran a gamut of topics from rock science, natural selection and genetics to how materials freeze or melt.

Johnson's rhymes are more than just scientific, they've also got rhythm and tight, clever lyrics, presented in their entirety here (click through for line-by-line annotations at Rap Genius):

Johns's delivery is more than just science set to rhyme scheme, which Emdin, in a recent interview (which you can watch below) with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedian Chuck Nice, explains is indicative of a deeper understanding:

Emdin: A lot of people do hip hop pedagogy [where they think] 'kids like rap, [so] let's rap,' and they create raps or they perform raps and it doesn't work. And the reason why it doesn't work is because it's what goes on in school already, [set] to rhyme. And that doesn't work.

The distinction between saying something that rhymes and being a prolific MC [is that the latter] requires analogy, metaphor, drawing connections, weaving stories

Nice: And… cross references

Emdin: yeah

Nice: Which means you have to learn and know some knowledge here and some knowledge here in order to access that and bring it together.

Emdin: Absolutely. I was working with a young person once, and we get into the classroom and I want him to learn about water. So I teach him the lesson and he says 'yeah, the lesson was alright,' so I go 'look, you're a rapper… spit a rap about [water]' and he starts rapping about everything but water. He's like 'I'm fly, I'm sick." He had like one line, 'I flow like water'… and I'm like 'that's not going to work. Go home, read the text book, come back and write a new rhyme.'

And he comes back in the morning and he's like 'yo, it's type hard to spit a 16 about H2O.'